Homeward Bound (17 page)

But when she found herself in the company of other Tosevites, she also found herself taking their side in arguments with males and females of the Race. Part of that, there, had hatched from Trir’s outrageous rudeness. Kassquit understood as much. The rest, though? She looked like a wild Big Ugly. Her biology was that of a wild Big Ugly. In evolutionary terms, the Race’s body paint was only skin deep. Beneath it, she remained a Tosevite herself.

“This concerns me, superior sir,” she told Ttomalss in his chamber in the hotel where the American Big Uglies also dwelt. “I wonder if my advice to the Race is adequate. I wonder if it is accurate. I have the odd feeling of being torn in two.”

“Your words do not surprise me,” her mentor said. Kassquit was relieved to hear it. He understood her better than any other member of the Race. Sometimes, though, that was not saying much. He went on, “Since your cultural and biological backgrounds are so different, is it much of a surprise that they often conflict? I would think not. What is your view?”

“I believe you speak the truth here,” Kassquit said, relieved to have the discussion persist and not founder on some rock of incomprehension. “Perhaps this accounts for some of my intense curiosity whenever I find myself around wild Big Uglies.”

“Perhaps it does,” Ttomalss agreed. “Well, no harm indulging your curiosity. You are not likely to betray the Race by doing so. Nor are you likely to go back into cold sleep and return to Tosev 3. Or do you think I am mistaken?”

“No, superior sir, I do not. And I thank you for your patience and understanding,” Kassquit said. “I hope you will forgive me for saying that I still find this world strange in many ways. Living on the starship orbiting Tosev 3 prepared me for some of it, but only for some. The males and females here are different from those I knew back there.”

“Those were picked males—and, later, females,” Ttomalss said. “The ones you meet here are not. They are apt to be less intelligent and less sophisticated than the males and females chosen to travel to the Tosevite solar system. Would you judge all Big Uglies on the basis of the ones the not-empire of the United States chose to send to Home?”

“I suppose not,” Kassquit admitted. “Still, that is a far smaller sample than the one the Race sent in the conquest and colonization fleets.”

“Indeed it is,” Ttomalss replied. “The reason being that we can send two large fleets to Tosev 3, while the wild Big Uglies have just managed to send a single starship to Home.”

“Yes, superior sir,” Kassquit said dutifully. But she could not resist adding, “Of course, when the Race first came to Tosev 3, the wild Big Uglies could not fly beyond their own atmosphere, or very far up into it. In what short period has the Race shown comparable growth?”

For some reason, that seemed to upset Ttomalss, who broke off the conversation. Kassquit wondered why—so much for his patience and understanding. Only the next day did she figure out what had gone wrong. He had compared Tosevites to the Race in a way that slighted her biological relatives. And what had she done in response? She had compared her species and the Race—to the advantage of the wild Big Uglies.

Things were as she’d warned him. Altogether without intending to, she’d proved as much. She was more like the Race than wild Big Uglies—and she was more like wild Big Uglies than the Race.

Males and females of the Race stared at her whenever she ventured out in public. Some of them asked her if she was a wild Big Ugly. That was a reasonable question. She always denied it politely. The males and females who kept talking with her after that were often curious how a Tosevite could be a citizen of the Empire. That was reasonable, too.

But then there were the males and females who had no idea what she was. Video had been coming back from Tosev 3 for 160 of Home’s years, but a good many members of the Race did not seem to know what a Big Ugly looked like. She got asked if she was a Hallessi, and even if she was a Rabotev. One of the ones who did that was wearing false hair to pretend to be a Big Ugly himself. Kassquit hadn’t imagined such ignorance was possible.

And males and females who did recognize her for a Tosevite kept sidling up to her and asking her if she could sell them any ginger. They got angry when she said no, too. “But you are from there!” they would say. “You must have some of the herb. You must!” Some of them were trembling in the early stages of ginger withdrawal.

At first, she tried to reason with them. “Why would I have any ginger?” she would ask. “It does nothing for my metabolism. For me, it is a spice, not a drug. And I have never tasted it; it was forbidden on the starship where I lived.”

Reasoning with members of the Race who craved ginger quickly proved impractical. It wasn’t Kassquit’s fault. She was willing, even eager, to go on reasoning. The males and females who were desperate for the herb weren’t.

“I will do anything. Anything!” a female said. Her emphatic cough was the most unnecessary one Kassquit had ever heard. “Just let me have some of the herb!” She would not believe Kassquit had none.

After a meeting with the wild Big Uglies, Kassquit asked them, “Do the males and females of Home cause you difficulties?”

They looked from one to another without answering right away. At last, the dark-skinned male, the one named Frank Coffey, said, “It is only to be expected that they are curious about us. Except for you, they have never seen a real live Big Ugly before.”

“You do not seem upset at the Race’s name for your folk,” Kassquit said.

Coffey shook his head, then remembered to use the negative hand gesture. “I am not,” he said. “We have our own name for the Race, you know, which is no more flattering to them than ‘Big Uglies’ is to us. And besides, I have been called worse things than a Big Ugly in my time.”

“Have you?” Kassquit said. This time, Coffey remembered right away to use the Race’s affirmative gesture. She asked him, “Do you mean as an individual? Why would anyone single you out as an individual? You do not seem much different from any other wild Tosevite I have met.”

“In some ways, I am typical. In other ways, I am not.” The Big Ugly tapped his bare left forearm with the first two fingers of his right hand. “I was not so much singled out as an individual. I was singled out because of this.”

“Because of what? Your arm?” Kassquit was confused, and did not try to hide it.

Frank Coffey laughed in the loud, uproarious Tosevite style. So did the other American Big Uglies. Coffey was so uproarious, he almost fell off the foam-rubber chair on which he was sitting. Shaped chunks of foam made a tolerable substitute for the sort of furniture Big Uglies used. The Race’s stools and chairs were not only too small but also made for fundaments of fundamentally different shape.

“No, not on account of my arm,” Coffey said when at last he stopped gasping and wheezing. “Because of the color of the skin on it.”

He was a darker brown than the other wild Big Uglies on Home, who had a good deal more pale tan and pink in their complexions. Kassquit was darker than they were, too, though not to the same degree as Frank Coffey. She said, “Ah. I have heard about that, yes. But I must say it puzzles me. Why would anyone do such an irrational thing?”

“How much time do you have?” Coffey asked. “I could tell you stories that would make your hair as curly as mine.” The rest of the wild Big Uglies took their leave, one by one. Maybe they had heard his stories before, or maybe they didn’t need to.

Kassquit’s hair was straight. She had never thought about it much one way or the other. The dark brown Big Ugly’s hair, by contrast, grew in tight ringlets on his head. She had noticed that before, but, again, hadn’t attached any importance to it. Now she wondered if she should. “Why would a story make my hair curl?” she asked. Then a possible answer occurred to her: “Did you translate one of your idioms literally into this language?”

Coffey made the affirmative gesture. “I did, and I apologize. Stories that would appall you, I should have said.”

“But why?” Kassquit asked. Then she held up a hand in a gesture both the Race and the Big Uglies used. “Wait. During the fighting, the Race tried to recruit dark-skinned Big Uglies in your not-empire. I know that.”

“Truth,” Coffey said. Kassquit was not expert at reading tone among Big Uglies, but she thought he sounded grim. His next words pleased her, for they showed she hadn’t been wrong: “They were able to do that because Tosevites of that race—that subspecies, you might say—had been so badly treated by the dominant lighter group.”

“But the experiment failed, did it not?” Kassquit said. “Most of the dark Tosevites preferred to stay loyal to their own not-empire.”

“Oh, yes. They decided being Tosevite counted most of all, or the large majority of them did, and they deserted the Race when combat began,” Frank Coffey said. “But that they joined the Race at all says a lot about how desperate they were. And, although we in the United States do not like to remember it, some of them did stay on the Race’s side, and they fought against my not-empire harder than the soldiers from your species did.”

Was he praising or condemning them? Kassquit couldn’t tell. She asked, “Why did they do that?”

Coffey’s expression was—quizzical? That would have been Kassquit’s guess, again from limited experience. He said, “You have never heard the word ‘nigger,’ have you?”

“Nigger?” Kassquit pronounced the unfamiliar word as well as she could. She made the negative gesture. “No, I never have. It must be from your language. What does it mean?”

“It means a dark-skinned Tosevite,” Coffey answered. “It is an insult, a strong insult. Next to it, something like ‘Big Ugly’ seems a compliment by comparison.”

“Why is there a special insulting term for a dark-skinned Tosevite?” Kassquit asked.

“There are special insulting terms for many different kinds of Tosevites,” Frank Coffey said. “There are terms for those with different beliefs about the spirit. And there are terms based on what language we speak, and those based on how we look. The one for dark-skinned Tosevites . . . One way to subject a group is to convince yourself—and maybe that group, too—that they are not fully intelligent creatures, that they do not deserve to share what you have. That is what ‘nigger’ does.”

“I see.” Kassquit wondered if she did. She pointed to him. “Yet you are here, in spite of those insults.”

“So I am,” the wild Tosevite said. “We have made some progress—not enough, but some. And I am very glad to be here, too.”

“I am also glad you are here,” Kassquit said politely.

T
hough Sam Yeager had not gone to the South Pole, there were times when he wanted to see more of Home than the Race felt like showing him. Because the Lizards had insisted on him as ambassador when the Doctor didn’t wake up, they had a hard time refusing him outright. They did do their best to make matters difficult.

Guards accompanied him wherever he went. “There are many males and females here who lost young friends on Tosev 3,” one of the guards told him. “That they should seek revenge is not impossible.”

He wished he could afford to laugh at the guard. But the female had a point. Friendship ties were stronger among the Race than in mankind, family ties far weaker. Save in the imperial family, kinship was not closely noted. In a species with a mating season, that was perhaps unsurprising.

Going into a department store was not the same when you had a guard with an assault rifle on either side of you. Of course, Sam would have stood out any which way: he was the alien who was almost tall enough to bump the ceiling. But that might have made members of the Race curious had he been alone. As things were, he frightened most of them.

Their department stores frightened him—or perhaps awed would have been the better word. Everything a Lizard could want to buy was on display under one roof. The store near the hotel where the Americans were quartered was bigger than any he’d ever seen in the USA: this even though Lizards were smaller than people and even though there was no clothing section, since the Race—except for the trend setters and weirdos who imitated Big Uglies—didn’t bother with clothes. If the Lizards wanted a ball for a game of long toss, a fishing net (what they caught weren’t quite fish, but the creatures did swim in water), a new mirror for an old car, something to read, something to listen to, something to eat, something to feed their befflem or tsiongyu, a television, a stove, a pot to put on the stove, a toy for a half-grown hatchling, an ointment to cure the purple itch, a sympathy card for someone else who had the purple itch, a plant with yellow almost-flowers, potting soil to transplant it, body paint, or anything else under Tau Ceti, they could get what they needed at the department store. The proud boast outside—
WITH OUR MART, YOU COULD BUILD A WALL AROUND THE WORLD
—seemed perfectly true.

The clerks wore special yellow body paint, and were trained to be relentlessly cheerful and courteous. “I greet you, superior sir,” they would say over and over, or else, “superior female.” Then they would add, “How may I serve you?”

Even in the face of a wild Big Ugly flanked by guards with weapons rarely seen on Home, their training did not quite desert them. More than one did ask, “Are you a male or a female, superior Tosevite?” And a couple of them thought Sam was a Hallessi, not a human. That left him both amused and bemused.

“I am a male, and the ambassador from the not-empire of the United States,” he would answer.

That often created more confusion than it cleared up. The clerks did not recognize the archaic word. “What is an ambassador?” they would ask, and, “What is a not-empire?”

Explaining an ambassador’s job wasn’t too hard, once Sam got across the idea of a nation that didn’t belong to the Empire. Explaining what a not-empire was proved harder. “You make your choices by counting snouts?” a clerk asked him. “What if the side with the most is wrong?”

“Then we try to fix it later,” Sam answered. “What do you do if the Emperor makes a mistake?”

He horrified not only the clerk but also his guards with that. “How could the Emperor make a mistake?” the clerk demanded, twisting his eye turrets down to the ground as he mentioned his sovereign. “He is the
Emperor
!” He looked down again.

“We think he made a mistake when he tried conquering Tosev 3,” Sam said. “This caused many, many deaths, both among the Race and among us Tosevites. And the Empire has gained very little because of it.”

“It must have been for the best, or the spirits of Emperors past would not have allowed it,” the clerk insisted.

Again, the guards showed they agreed. Sam only shrugged and said, “Well, I am a stranger here. Maybe you are right.” The Lizards seemed pleased. They thought he had admitted the clerk
was
right. He knew he’d done no such thing. But, more than a hundred years before, while he was growing up on a Nebraska farm, his father had always loudly insisted there was no point to arguing about religion, because nobody could prove a damned thing. The Race had believed what it believed for a
lot
longer than mankind had clung to any of its faiths—which again proved exactly nothing.

When he and the guards left the department store, one of them asked, “Where would you like to go now, superior Tosevite? Back to your hotel?” He sounded quite humanly hopeful.

Sam made the negative hand gesture. He stood out in the middle of the vast parking lot surrounding the department store. Lizards driving in to shop would almost have accidents because they were turning their eye turrets to gape at him instead of watching where they were going. The weather was—surprise!—hot and dry, about like an August day in Los Angeles. He didn’t mind the heat, or not too much. It felt good on his old bones and made him feel more limber than he really was.

“Well, superior Tosevite, if you do not want to go back to the hotel, where
would
you like to go?” the guard asked with exaggerated patience. Plainly, the Lizard thought Sam would have no good answer.

But he did: “If you would be so kind, would you take me to a place that sells old books and periodicals?”

His guards put their heads together. Then one of them pulled out a little gadget that reminded Sam of a Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio, but that they insisted on calling a telephone. It did more than any telephone Yeager had ever imagined; they could even use it to consult the Race’s Home-spanning electronic network.

Here, the Lizard simply used it as a phone, then put it away. “Very well, superior Tosevite. It shall be done,” she said. “Come with us.”

His official vehicle had been—somewhat—adapted to his presence. It had almost enough leg room for him, and its seat didn’t make his posterior too uncomfortable. Still, he wasn’t sorry whenever he got out of it. The guards had taken him to an older part of Sitneff. How old did that make the buildings here? As old as the Declaration of Independence? The discovery of America? The Norman conquest? There were towns in Europe with buildings that old. But had these been around for the time of Christ? The erection of Stonehenge? Of the Pyramids? Lord, had they been around since the domestication of the dog? Since the last Ice Age? If the guards had said so, Sam would have been in no position to contradict them. He saw old, old sidewalks and weathered brick fronts on the buildings. How long would the brickwork have taken to get to look like that? He had not the faintest idea.

The sign above the door said
SSTRAVO’S USED BOOKS OF ALL PERIODS
. That certainly sounded promising. Sam had to duck to get through the doorway, but he was just about used to that. An electronic hiss did duty for the bell that would have chimed at a shop in the United States.

An old Lizard fiddled around behind the counter. On Earth, Sam hadn’t seen really old Lizards. The males of the conquest fleet and males and females of the colonization fleet had almost all been young or in their prime. Even their highest officers hadn’t been elderly, though Atvar and some others had long since left youth behind. But this male creaked. His back was bent. He moved stiffly. His scales were dull, while his hide hung loose on his bones.

“I greet you,” he said to Sam Yeager, as if Yeager were an ordinary customer. “What can I show you today?”

“You are Sstravo?” Sam asked.

“I am,” the old male replied. “And you are a Big Ugly. You must be able to read our language, or you would not be here. So what can I show you? Would you like to see a copy of the report our probe sent back from your planet? I have one.”

That report went back almost nine hundred years now. Was it a recent reprint, or did the Race’s paper outlast most of its Earthly equivalents? Despite some curiosity, Sam made the negative gesture. “No, thank you. I have seen most of that report in electronic form on Tosev 3. Can you show me some older books that are unlikely to have made the journey from your world to mine? They can be history or fiction. I am looking for things to help me understand the Race better.”

“We often do not understand ourselves. How a Big Ugly can hope to do so is beyond me,” Sstravo said. “But you are brave—though perhaps foolish—to make the effort. Let me see what I can find for you.”

He doddered over to a shelf full of books with spines and titles so faded Sam could not make them out and pulled one volume off it. “Here. You might try this.”

“What is it called?” Sam asked.

“Gone with the Wind,”
Sstravo answered.

Sam burst out laughing. Sstravo stared at him. That loud, raucous sound had surely never been heard in this shop before. “I apologize,” Sam said. “But that is also the title of a famous piece of fiction in my world.”

“Ours dates from seventy-three thousand years ago,” Sstravo said. “How old is yours?”

Even dividing by two to turn the number into terrestrial years, that was a hell of an old book. “Ours is less than two hundred of your years old,” Sam admitted.

“Modern art, is it? I have never been partial to modern art. But ours may interest you,” Sstravo said.

“So it may,” Sam said. “But since I only know your language as it is used now, will I be able to understand this?”

“You will find some strange words, a few odd turns of phrase,” the bookseller said. “Most of it, though, you will follow without much trouble. Our language does not change quickly. Nothing about us changes quickly. But our speech has mostly stayed the same since sound and video recording carved the preferred forms in stone.”

“All right, then,” Sam said. “What is the story about?”

“Friends who separate over time,” Sstravo answered. One of the guards made the affirmative gesture, so maybe she’d read the book. Sam kept thinking of Clark Gable. Sstravo went on, “What else would one find to write about? What else is there to write about?”

“We Tosevites feel that way about the attraction between male and female,” Sam said. Sstravo and the guards laughed. Sam might have known—he had known—they would think that was funny. He held up the copy of
Gone with the Wind
that owed nothing to Margaret Mitchell. Cro-Magnons hadn’t finished replacing Neanderthals when this was written. “I will take this. How do I make arrangements to pay you?”

“I will do it,” one guard said. “I shall be reimbursed.”

“I thank you,” Sam said. The guard gave Sstravo a credit card. The bookseller rang up the purchase on a register that might have been as old as the novel. It worked, though.
“Gone with the Wind,”
Sam murmured. He started laughing all over again.

Jonathan Yeager hadn’t seen his father for seventeen years. For all practical purposes, his father might as well have been dead. Now he was back, and he hadn’t changed a bit in all that time. Jonathan, meanwhile, had gone from a young man into middle age. Cold sleep had a way of complicating relationships just this side of adultery.

At least his father also recognized the difficulty. “You’ve changed while I wasn’t looking,” he said to Jonathan one evening as they sat in the elder Yeager’s inadequately air-conditioned room.

“That’s what you get for going to sleep while I stayed awake,” Jonathan answered. He sipped at a drink. The Lizards had given them pure ethyl alcohol. Cut with water, it did duty for vodka. The Race didn’t use ice cubes, though, and seemed horrified at the idea.

His old man had a drink on the low round metal table beside him, too. After a nip from it, he nodded. “Well, I was encouraged to do that. They didn’t come right out and say so, but I got the notion it was good for my life expectancy.” He shook his head in wonder. “Since I’m heading toward a hundred and twenty-five now, I guess it must have been— assuming I ever woke up again, of course.”

“Yeah. Assuming,” Jonathan said. He’d got used to not having his father around, to standing on the front line in the war against Father Time. Now he had some cover again. If his father was still around, he couldn’t be too far over the hill himself, could he? Of course, his father had stood still for a while, even as he’d kept going over that hill himself.

“They wanted to get rid of me, and they did,” his dad said. “They might have made sure I had an ‘accident’ instead, if they could have sneaked it past the Race. If I hadn’t taken cold sleep, they probably would have tried that. But after Gordon tried to blow my head off and didn’t quite make it, the warning they got from the Lizards must have made them leery of doing it if they didn’t have to.”

“So here you are, and you’re in charge of things,” Jonathan said. “That ought to make them start tearing their hair out when they hear about it ten-plus years from now.”

“I thought so, too, when I woke up and the Doctor didn’t,” his father replied. “But now I doubt it. I doubt it like hell, as a matter of fact. They’ll be into the 2040s by the time word of that gets back to Earth. By then, it will have been more than sixty years since I went into cold sleep and more than seventy-five since I made a real nuisance of myself. Hardly anybody will remember who I am. If I do a decent job of dealing with the Lizards, that’s all that’ll matter. Time heals all wounds.”